Sanket Sinojia

Yes sure,Let me start it with some brief history, I have completed my under-graduated in Science in 2007, (like 11 years back). Then I decided to join a pharmaceutical sciences for my graduation, before joining there was like 3 months of vacation so I decided to learn some languages for other time, I learn the PHP, VB.NET and the HTML. During these 3 months I get keen interest in these languages and software. Then I started learning pharmacy. In my career I came to know about the pharmacological data and started putting those data into graphs and started calculating some basic statistics, there was a time I was doing excel and lastly, in my final years I came to know about SAS from two of my best friend, Neel and Jaydeep. Then I decided to join statistical programming and for training purpose, We four including one my other friend Tausif, we four started learning SAS at Epoch Institute that is Ahmedabad based SAS authorized training center, and for the next eight months when we’ve gone through the training where I learn BASE SAS, ADVANCED SAS and CLINICAL SAS programming. I also learnt basic statistics and some analysis concepts which used in clinical trials. and I also learn the clinical data integration studio, a tool of SAS and kind of SDTM tool for CDISC data standards concepts. And then in March 2012, I have joined cliantha research, that is a clinical data organization and I started my career from there and like everyone says you’re first career place where you tend to have your career growth and I was very lucky enough to get an opportunity to work with cliantha, it was like an open ground for me to learn and grow every day in ever year so I interact with many different kind of people over there with different backgrounds like quality assurance, quality control, clinical data management, statisticians, protocol writers, report writers and by interacting with them I learn many things in the early stage of my career and then after I worked with couple other organization that is PAREXEL International, Cliantha Reasearch Limited then I worked with QuintilesIMS that is now IQVIA and recently I have accepted the role of Senior Statistical programmer at Cytel, that is 3 months back, during this all journey and all of around 6.5 years of time have been a SAS user. I have learned many things in SAS and it’s allied industry like CDISC data standard. I am also a member of CDISC & PhUSE for different groups and teams. In publications, many of my contributions in CDISC, SAS has been published in many online portal including the Pharmabiz which an online portal, the magazine kind of thing which is the largest in India.

For me there are many tips and one of that is you understand your data and understand your task which will help you achieve it. Now, this one is my first priority list. Many times when people start a career with SAS programming, they start doing just programming when they receive some task for their assignment and at the end they completed like 90% of that then they realize that oh they need to do something like this at prior level or in the early stage, then they have like (you know) mess-up things they have to start and work again. This combine things ultimately the waste of your time. So to avoid that the first and foremost thing is understand your requirement properly what you have to do what you want to do and also observe your data, as a programmer you always need to play your data and whenever you have some task to do, just observe your data plus the technique you required to do the analysis, if not then try to understand why it is not and first of all make it correct otherwise you will really to end up with wrong analysis so first thing is observe your data and understand your task very well.

Second thing is automation. I really like MACROs and like to do automation in things which we are doing very repeatedly. But it should not be automation for just sake of automation. So don’t do the automation just to say that yes we are doing the automation. Many times it’s like when we are refrain to some other conferences and people start looking at our organization we will also use some MACRO based solution and we will also implement automation there but then instead of focusing on the output and requirement they just do it for the automation purpose and then at the end they invest time, they invest resources and ultimately their automation is not gonna use. So just focus on the requirement and if it is required then only you do your MACRO or any other tool based automation.

Third one is like upgrade yourself every day. In SAS programming, if you learn or if you was for like 5 years or 10 years, you will hardly have your syntax used like 5% or 6% in 10 years of experience because this is very huge, so always try to learn at least one option, one kind of procedure or one element or statement, this will make you updated in every kind. For me, I really love the graphs and I know that SAS is doing fantastic things on graphs, so I always try to learn something new on graphs, it really helped and I keep myself updated. So the third thing of becoming a good programmer is that keep yourself updated.

For me, as I mentioned that I like MACROs and I truly a macro-lover so whenever I am to do a task, I prefer to do it on MACRO basis and evidently I also like graphs because I prefer that most of us people that graphs speaks very well compared to numbers or statistics. So I like to play with graphs. I started graph from very initial stage where we used work with PROC GCHART & SGCHART and then we moved to the PROC Template and the SGRENDER procedure that is called the GTL process to generate graphs which is the latest in SAS. So right now my procedure that I will recommend is the PROC template along with SGRENDER because it used me flexibility, I can do a very good amount of wonders with this procedure PROC template and it gives me so much flexibility that I can complete my customers’ requirement, as we are working in clinical research which is regulated environment with different therapeutic areas and different customers and they do have different sets of requirements and particularly in graphs for anyone is very picky so it helps me in PROC template to create like every satisfied customer with each of the requirement so my favorite procedure is PROC template.

First of all I thank Data-Steps and you for investing your time and to give me an opportunity to speak with you and through your platform I am able to connect SAS community. So this really helped me and I’m sure it will help new learners, they may get some information by this interview. Apart from that I want to close it with ‘Share the knowledge’. I believe in this concept ever since I started my career, SAS was my skill and now SAS is become my passion, whenever I got the knowledge to SAS or its allied industry I always try to share with others and try to share on social media or WhatsApp groups so it helps me to get knowledge. Thus I can also get some information from other and I also give information which they might need and that will make their life easy. Apart from that I’d kind of request which I can say to every professional who have higher experience in this industry for like 5 years or 10 years, they should be involved in training for new learners or college students.